


orthodoxy

by liminal



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, F/M, Gen, Murder, Organized Crime, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, White Collar Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 20:36:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminal/pseuds/liminal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soft heart, soft hands, soft mind, failure. For the Crawleys, failure is never an option. Success is the creed they adhere to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	orthodoxy

**Author's Note:**

> orthodoxy: adherence to accepted norms

1.

God moves in small ways, though Robert is inclined to think that this time, He’s outdone Himself. He's laid the best-set plan to ruin in doing so, but that’s no matter. Robert can’t help but marvel over the sheer perfection of it all. No one will know now.

There's no room for the soft hearted in this line of business. Soft heart, soft hands, soft mind, failure. It’s a slippery slope and Robert has no intention of dirtying his hands as he attempts to remedy the situation. So he and Mama and Cora all agree: Patrick, like Isaac, must be sacrificed for the greater good. Hardened heart, steady hands, clear mind. Victory. 

Remarkable, really, how so many of the greatest plans involve water. Noah. Jonah. Robert had had every intention of following suit; they called it 'the ship of dreams', and the Titanic would deliver him from this living nightmare. A generous tip to the right man, a small clear vial and no one would have been be any the wiser. _TRAGEDY ON THE TITANIC_ , the society page by-lines would have run, _FATHER AND SON PERISH_. Then an appropriate period of mourning and keeping their heads down, a few months of ‘such-a-shame’s and ‘our-prayers-are-with-them’s. No one would have known how miraculously their fervent prayers had been answered.

But instead Robert sits at the breakfast table and tries not to laugh, to burst into song and proclaim the wonders of the world. _TITANIC SINKS_ , runs the Times’ headline. The scope of such a miracle is beyond comprehension, though it runs to biblical proportions. What better a way to solve a problem than through divine intervention? 

And now Mary will reign after him, the good Mary, Mary the Blessed. Robert excuses himself with dignity, shell-shocked from delight and triumph, and wanders through the house that has been saved. The village bells ring out to mark the hour and his mind turns to Church, to hymns, to Psalms.

_Psalm 117: Praise the LORD! For great is his love towards us._

And how great it has proved to be.

 

2.

What is it that lies between failure and success, Mary wonders. What word can be applied to this troubling assignment? Completed, as one would expect from a Crawley venture, yet there are whispers and raised eyebrows that defy convention. 

The blame, in Mary’s eyes, rests squarely with Edith. That Pamuk didn’t fall from his horse, that he didn’t drink the prepared aperitif, that he escaped the dagger by moving rooms in the middle of the night cannot truly be attributed to her sister; but Mary is under no illusion that Edith is responsible for letting society know exactly how Pamuk's demise came about. Mary is not one to forgive the rumours now circulating that her skill set extends to the bedroom, or to forget that her reputation has suffered irreparable damage at her sister’s hands.

She will, she vows (and she swears it like a Benedictine oath), have her revenge. The success of the assignment - however it happened, Pamuk is dead and the Home Office can rest easy - is what raises Mary from perdition, prevents her transformation into a pariah, but she will respond in time, in kind. 

_Exodus 21:23-24: But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot._

And Mary will take it all.

 

3.

Bates is a sinner, at home in the darkness where the Crawleys work, for he has brought seven plagues upon himself, upon the Family and upon Anna. The first is deception, and memories and uneasy thoughts swirl around in his head until the early hours of the mornings. The second is enlightenment, as the shadows in which the house operates are forced to recede in the wake of searchlights and the whites of querying eyes. The third is control, slipping through his fingers as he sits under the watchful gaze of something bigger than himself. The fourth is investigation, which runs its fingers over the minute cracks in his façade, in Anna’s, in the family’s, and probes for a weak point. The fifth is judgement, which the Crawleys are more accustomed to passing themselves than having hanging over them. The sixth is attention, more fatal than its predecessors by far, and the seventh… 

The seventh is the Hangman’s Noose, which coils itself around the Abbey and does not loosen its grip.

But Vera was a pestilence and death the antidote, so God help him, Bates swears he would do the same again. He was the exorcism, she the Devil (not such a fallen angel), and the Crawleys have taught him well. They won’t catch him for this, won’t pin him on a cross and nail his guilt into him. No one will sell him out for a handful of coins and a kiss. 

 

4\. 

She watches him address the Family, talking his way into the advantage, and smiles to herself. Her instincts were right; he’s more than a disciple, he's the rock on which she'll build her life. And, perhaps, the deeds of their life together will be known as the Gospel of Tom and Sybil, full of heroics and tricks, though his conversion will always be their greatest miracle.

_Miracle: A highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment._

Because God knows it should never have happened, will never be allowed to happen again. Together they have transcended all boundaries, defied all expectations and conventions. Together they have achieved the impossible, even if her aura is no longer so pure, her halo a little dented. They are each other’s salvation: hers from a life of monotony and dispassionate assignments, his from a life of obscurity and a dirtier kind of sinning.

They rise together, a pair of mismatched angels, solemn in their devotion to their chosen causes and brilliant in the blazing light of their love, the blazing light of the manor house going up in flames. It’s almost pagan, the way they watch the flames lick the night sky, but they glow like Byzantine murals.

 

5.

If the war has taught Matthew anything, it’s that patience brings reward and planning reaps dividends. If the war has done him any good (because it has also wreaked havoc in wedging him and Mary apart), it is good that the Family benefits from, too. If the war has brought him anything, it has brought him the Swires.

Mother taught him selflessness and the vicar told him that rich men face damnation, but pious words cannot wipe out a childhood of struggling and feeling like he was meant for more. The Family has shown him the other way to live. The beauty of his face lies in its deceptive nature: he has the blond hair, blue eyes and soft cheeks of cherubim, but Matthew is learning to live for the richness of the moment, and what riches are promised by Reginald Crawley. _There’s a lot of money_ , he later tells Mother, _not that you’d know it from his way of living_. The Family has taught Matthew the scent of opportunity and Lavinia, with hair like gold-spun straw and naivety written across her features, was saturated in it.

Route A (straight-forward, brutal; like crawling on your stomach under barbed wire and feeling your heart in your throat when the searchlight flashes over your position) is simple. Marry Lavinia, off Reginald, take the money, off Lavinia. What jury would suspect the blond-haired, baby-faced widowed war hero? Route B (guttural, instinctive; like tossing the grenade back in the direction it came from with a fervent prayer that it’s not too late) is harder, but his adrenaline spikes when he acts in the moment, and the awakened soldier within him approves.

Such a tragedy that Influenza took one as young and beautiful as Lavinia. A crying shame that Reginald couldn’t survive the blow. His only child, you see, he has no wife. 

So all that remains is to tie up the loose ends and wait, and a man who waited three years for war to end can afford to wait for a few weeks longer. How very convenient, he thinks when the letter comes through, for there to be trouble finding beneficiaries for a forged will. How very middle-class, he smirks when it all pays off, for a Crawley to use a lawyer to solve their problems. 

Not so, Mary assures him, in between delirious kisses. Ingenious. Inspired. She tells him that he has risen so high, that he stands tall on the mountain and can teach them all something. 

It hasn’t come naturally, but war has taught him to live for himself. “Carpe diem,” he murmurs against alabaster skin, caught up in a lusty and unholy embrace.

_Proverbs 27:1: Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring._

 

6.

She still prays for him, however much she wishes she didn’t. It’s not an ordinary practice for someone who does what she does, and she does not need to be told that he doesn’t deserve it. She wants to wash her hands of him, to absolve herself and live again, but memories flow through her mind like blood from stigmata and prayers seem to be the only remedy.

Mary and Sybil have it so easy, Edith thinks, seen as more than pieces to be manipulated and loving men who join them in this line of business, forging a partnership as sacred as their marital bond. They have always been revered, Mary for her looks and wit, Sybil for her charm and deceptive softness. Edith has nothing to recommend her, and she kneels prostrate each night. On her knees, eyes closed, hands together, a multitude of prayers run through her mind and over her lips. Prayers for the man who was her target, for the man she fell in love with, for the man who escaped.

She hears Mary’s response in her mind when it’s quiet at night in her room and the others are occupied by lovers: _pray for yourself, you’re the one that needs saving_. But Edith knows that she had come so close to salvation, that it had arrived in her life at long last in the form of a widower with a useless arm and a smile like her own. A widower with a useless arm and a smile like her own that the Home Office wanted rid of, that she was assigned to marry and chip away at and remove.

So she prays. Edith prays for the family, that they will stand strong; for herself, that she will recover; for Anthony, that he will live as he ought to. She prays, too, for Matthew, who understood and stood by her, who defied the others and had a helping hand in the failure of the task. She prays that he will lead the exodus, bring them out of the darkness. Prayers, though, are fickle things.

Her prayers do not fend off the Flood and though the house becomes their Ark, they are sent no warning.

Anthony, she hears through word of mouth, is a ghost of his former self; hopelessly wandering and extolling her virtues to all he meets. Further proof, if ever she needed it, of the fruitlessness of her endeavours.

 

7.

Walking down the road, pacified only slightly by tea and his familiar scent and the feel of her arm in the crook of his, Mary wonders if this is how Tom feels before Confession. Because there’s no happy outcome possible, there is no absolution. She’s washing her hands of the man she loves, the man they brought into the fold, the man meant to be their saviour who has instead traded their lifeblood, their very existence, for change and enlightenment. 

And oh, Lord, he had had such potential, had done things she had never considered or thought possible. The Swires had been perfect, had been played like an organ during Matins, and they had ascended together when they were both finally free of entanglements, when they were man and wife and never to be parted. It was a marriage of her two loves: Matthew and her family, and she didn’t think the prothalamion would ever end.

But Newton’s laws were strict (to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction), and as remarkable as his progression had been, the regression was agonisingly spectacular. Maybe he had aspired to heights beyond his reckoning, because he had fallen from the verge of omnipotence and bound himself in the chains of ineptitude; softness; conscience. What hideous ruin, to plummet from the heady beauty of the Swire months to the perdition that was the changes he and Tom had enforced upon Papa, the failure of the Strallan business. 

Though perhaps the Ascent, the Glory Days and the Fall were inevitable, because he wasn’t a real Crawley. Not in the sense that they were, they who had been brought up on this way of life, they who were more comfortable in the half-light and the shadows. Nature versus nurture, and nature had won out.

Just as it would with their child, who would have the best of Matthew’s human understanding, and all of Mary’s ability. This child would be the best of them, in a way that its father could not be. 

Second-best is dangerous. Second-best gets you killed.

And they all know it.

In the end, she doesn’t make the call, doesn’t know which of her elders plays God and casts judgment. It’s a risky move, but then no one does risk better than they do. He might have been fine at the wheel, might have reacted in time and arrived home with two stories to tell: one about a boy with hair like caramel, the other about a man with a glint in his eye who came far too close to driving him off the road. But his nature would always be the end of him, one way or another. Trust him to be overcome with emotion, trust him to want to deliver the news in person. Trust him to relax and make himself a sitting target.

Her name swirls round and round in the haze of unconsciousness; a prayer on the wooden beads of a rosary, a benediction of love and forgiveness. And he knows, understands, appreciates as he lies on the ground, dying, dying, dead. 

Hail Mary, full of grace…


End file.
